“What
Economics Courses Don’t Teach – But Should”
Presentation by Neva Goodwin
for the session on Education and Sustainable Development
in the conference Globalisation, New Economy and the
Environment:
Business and Society Challenges for Sustainable Development
sponsored by the Russian Society for Ecological Economics
St. Petersburg, June 25, 2005

On June 24-25 in St. Petersburg Neva
Goodwin attended the conference of the Russian Society
for Ecological Economics. The location was the faculty
of economics at Saint Petersburg State University.
Dr. Goodwin gave a talk called “What Economics
Courses Don’t Teach – But Should,”
summarizing some topics that are dealt with in the
Russian edition of Microeconomics in Context that
are not adequately covered in standard texts. Near
the end of the conference Dr. Goodwin also held a
session to talk about the text itself – its
history and the philosophy behind it.

175 copies of the textbook and the accompanying Teachers’
Manual (in itself a pedagogical innovation for the
Russian context) were shipped from Moscow to St. Petersburg
for the conference. Over lunch on Saturday an announcement
was made that the sets were available to all interested
conference participants from Russian-language universities.
About 100 copies were taken by participants, many
of whom expressed considerable interest. Ivan Petrovich
Boiko, Dean of the Faculty of Sciences, made a strong
request to keep the remaining copies; we hope they
will be used as the basis for microeconomics courses
at Saint Petersburg State University.

The textbook had originally been published by the
Russian State University for the Humanities, of which
the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was a principal
funder. Since his much publicized detention and arrest
the textbook has languished – along with much
else at that university. The 2005 St. Petersburg conference
was, in effect, the first exposure it has received.
The positive response to this exposure gives reason
to hope that it will finally begin to be used.

Click on the links below to download
Neva Goodwin’s talk, “What Economics
Courses Don’t Teach – But Should”
in the short version as presented at the
RSEE conference in English or Russian, and also a
longer version.